Description
Book SynopsisA conventional wisdom in media studies is that when it bleeds it leads. The media love violence and from the newsroom perspective, negative news is good news. Violent death often makes it to the headlines, and mass violent death events often become media events that receive immediate continuous attention worldwide. However, reporting violent death is not only about sending information, but also about the maintenance of society. News about violent death functions as media rituals which elicit grief and inform a sense of care and belonging. Accordingly, this book takes a broader sociological and anthropological approach to considering the role of death and the media in organising social life in a global age. Based on literature on solidarity and social cohesion, death rituals, media rituals, and journalism studies, this book examines whether and how the performance of the media at the occurrence of mass violent death events informs solidarity and interconnectedness on a cosmopolitan l
Trade Review
“The Mourning News is an original study that guides us through the complexities of witnessing mass death under conditions of mediatisation. As major broadcasters continue to play a key role in the reporting of distant disasters, Tal Morse’s book reminds us that these broadcasters do not simply report on mass death but profoundly shape the ways our communities mourn together. More than this, it compellingly demonstrates that mediatised death does not only unite but also divides us. Rather than honouring our common humanity, it creates its own hierarchies of humanity by subtly proposing whose life matters and whose does not, in the global village.”—Lilie Chouliaraki, Professor, Department of Media and Communications, The London School of Economics and Political Science
“Do we grieve for the deaths of strangers, and if so, by what means? Are all strangers made equal in this grief by the representation of their deaths in contemporary media? And can media representations of the deaths of strangers create and sustain a cosmopolitan framework of ethical care that transcends national boundaries and global power asymmetries? These are the urgent moral, political and communicative questions posed with interpretative acuity in Tal Morse’s comparative exploration of television news coverage of mass-death events—the 2011 Norway Attacks, the 2008–2009 Gaza War, and the 2010 Haitian Earthquake. Insightful and profound, The Mourning News casts a powerful new light on how media shape the terrain of global moral concern.”—Paul Frosh, Professor, Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations – Acknowledgments – Introduction – Solidarity, Rituals and the Media – The Mediatisation of Death – Global Crisis Reporting and Cosmopolitanism – Towards the Analytics of Grievability – Empathising Grief—The Case of the 2011 Norway Attacks – Judicial Grief and Condemnator – Moving Grief—The Case of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake – Mediatised Grief and the Fallacy and Promise of Cosmopolitanism – Conclusion – Appendix A – Appendix B – Index.
